Installation

PolyChron is a GUI application written in python using tkinter. If you are familiar with python, polychron can be installed using pip, and Graphviz must be installed on your system.

Installing dependencies

polychron is a Python package which uses Graphviz for graph rendering. Before you install polychron, you should ensure a compatible version of python is available (with pip, tkinter and ideally venv) and should install graphviz.

graphviz

Graphviz can be downloaded and installed from the graphviz website, or using a package manager:

LinuxmacOSWindows

# debian, ubuntu, etc.
sudo apt install graphviz
# fedora, RHEL, Rocky, etc.
sudo dnf install graphviz

# using brew (if installed)
brew install graphviz

# using chocolatey (if installed)
choco install graphviz --no-progress -y

python

polychron 0.2.0 supports the following python versions:

• 3.9
• 3.10
• 3.11
• 3.12
• 3.13

Newer python versions may be usable, but have not been tested.

A suitable python may be installed on your system, otherwise you will need to install python with pip, tkinter (and ideally venv) from:

• Your operating systems package manager (i.e. apt, dnf, brew)
• From the Official Python Downloads

• Using a tool such as pyenv.

  Warning

  uv managed installations of python are not currently usable with polychron. See bryonymoody/PolyChron#104 for more information.

In some cases, pip, tkinter or venv may not be installed with the operating system's python installation and may need to be installed.

LinuxmacOS

# e.g. for Ubuntu/Debian
apt-get install python3-pip python3-tk python3-venv

# using brew (if python was installed with brew)
brew install python-tk

Installing polychron

with pip recommended

polychron is a Python package and released versions of polychron can be installed from PyPI using pip, ideally in a virtual environment.

python3 -m pip install polychron

with git

polychron can be installed from source using pip, using the latest development version or specific releases.

mainv0.2.0

python3 -m pip install git+https://github.com/bryonymoody/PolyChron.git

python3 -m pip install git+https://github.com/bryonymoody/PolyChron.git@v0.2.0

Or by cloning the git repository from GitHub and installing into the current python environment.

git clone https://github.com/bryonymoody/PolyChron
cd PolyChron
python3 -m pip install .

Tip

If you are installing PolyChron from source as a developer, consider using an editable installation (-e / --editable) and installing the dev, doc and test extras.

python3 -m pip install -e .[dev,doc,test]

Launching polychron

Once installed, polychron can be launched from the command line.

# via the executable script
polychron
# or by running the installed polychron module
python3 -m polychron

For full command line options, see -h / --help, and refer to the Using PolyChron documentation

polychron --help